Staff Engineer - AI

Responsibilities:

• Design and build the agent end-to-end: orchestration, tool calling, multi-turn state and memory, retrieval, and guardrails.
• Build the core loop: understand intent, find the right events, and help fans book when they're ready.
• Handle the messy parts of conversation: multilingual queries, session handoffs, and recovering well when the agent gets it wrong.
• Define what "good" looks like for each capability, build eval sets from real sessions, and use them to decide what ships.
• Set up tracing and debugging so bad responses can be traced back to a prompt, a tool, retrieval, or code.
• Choose models and architecture based on latency, quality, and cost, including knowing when a smaller model or a simple rule does the job.
• Raise the quality of engineering around you through reviews and examples.
• Work with product and leadership on what Shadow does next.

Requirements:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 1+ year on agentic systems.
• You've shipped an agent that takes actions, not just one that answers questions.
• Hands-on with the current stack: model APIs, orchestration, RAG, structured outputs, and multi-turn state.
• You can explain how you measured whether something you shipped actually worked.
• Strong backend skills in Python and/or TypeScript.
• You think about latency, cost, prompt versioning, and what happens when things fail.
• You've taken ambiguous projects from start to finish.
• You use AI tools well in your own work and know where they fall short.

Nice to Have:

• LLM observability tools (Langfuse, LangSmith, Datadog LLM Observability).
• Payments, ticketing, or marketplace experience in India.
• Fine-tuning or serving open-weight models.
• Familiarity with our stack: Next.js, Go, AWS, Cloudflare.